


Outro

by bakerstreetafternoon



Category: The Beatles
Genre: Angst, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-17
Updated: 2018-03-17
Packaged: 2019-04-01 09:37:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,382
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13995504
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bakerstreetafternoon/pseuds/bakerstreetafternoon
Summary: May through July, 1968.Had it been this tension that had kept them together? Had it always?Outro (n): the ending of a musical composition. In all musical forms, this can include "altogether unexpected digressions just as a work is drawing to its close, followed by a return to a consequently more emphatic confirmation of the structural relations implied in the body of the work."





	Outro

 

a few go  
to the Coast without gain —  
The language is missing them  
they die also  
incommunicado.  
  
The language, the language  
fails them  
They do not know the words  
or have not  
the courage to use them

– William Carlos Williams  
_Paterson_

 

I ain't happy here, my honey  
Can you take me back?

– Paul McCartney

* 

 

 **May 1968  
** **Manhattan**

 

Manhattan was pretty in the spring, lively, pale green with tree buds. It wasn't like Liverpool, still dirty-grey and steely in May, and it wasn't like London. The smell of the spring was different. It charmed Paul.

Paul and John hadn't been in America together since Candlestick. That had been two years ago - it seemed unbelievable, that. Their last concert had only been twenty scant months in the past. The events of 1966 felt a decade ago, a decade at _least,_  with all that had come and gone.

They were in New York to promote Apple. Interviews, the press - Paul was all right in his jacket, but he thought John looked strangled by his tie, a bit like he was at a fancy dress party. It had been a long time since they’d been through the gauntlet, the round after round of press conferences like this and Paul barely remembered how to do it. The press were different, too. The interviewers were from glossy, serious outlets like Fortune instead of Tiger Beat. The questions were solemn, respectful, like he and John were some sort of serious economic force - which was absurd, of course.

The few interviewers they recognized (good old Larry Kane, for one) seemed struck by the difference from the boisterous, giggling Lennon-McCartney partnership of those short years ago. But Larry looked almost the same, he sounded almost the same. It was Paul and John who had changed.

Larry asked them about the campus riots and SDS or whatever it was and John answered intelligently - John always managed to answer intelligently, no matter the topic - and Larry said that four years ago those kids had been Beatle people, and John said “They’ve grown up,” and Paul, silent, was struck by how true all that was. How true it was that they had all grown up - how sorrowful, how profound that you could go from that into this, from Beatlemania to sitting round in hotels talking about business. Fucking business.

The best he could muster was “It’s a drag.” Well, that was why they called John the clever one.

The highlight of the day was when Paul gave his number to a pretty blonde photographer.

At least they were staying in an apartment on this trip, for sometimes Paul felt he’d had enough hotels for one lad’s life. No matter how posh the accommodations, there were only so many times you could fumble with tiny soaps before you started longing for the comforts of home. Nat, their American lawyer, was loaning them his apartment on the Upper East Side and if it wasn’t really home, still it was quiet and had very comfortable beds - and even a cat, which delighted John. The cat alone meant that Nat’s apartment was loads better than a hotel, really, even without taking into account the lovely posh tree-lined street and yellow cabs and Central Park right there and everything you could want from New York. Paul didn’t think he’d even been able to take a spare breath on any of their previous trips to New York and so he was loving this trip - the parts of it that didn’t involve facing cameras and answering stupid questions, anyway. 

Cameras. Stupid questions. Speaking of things you could have enough of for one lad’s life.

After the latest interview - Larry’s, which had taken place in one of the poshest hotels Paul had ever seen, all white and gold rococo everywhere - they returned to the apartment. It was wonderfully mismatched, comfortably lived-in, magazines scattered about, the kind of environment he liked. Or maybe he just liked that no one knew where they were and no one was hanging on the bell all day wanting a bit of them. It had been a long time since he and John had spent days one-on-one like this, but they’d done it enough that Paul didn’t feel too out of practice. 

This was the third night and they passed it much as they’d passed the first two, sitting round on Nat Weiss’s Chesterfield passing a joint back and forth, sharing the comfortable tiredness of travel, of men living out of their suitcases. Neither of them touched their guitars - it was bloody hard to feel like making music after hours and hours of talking about money and investments and things - but it was nice to just sit and talk, sometimes, anyway. John was John, and with him Paul didn’t feel pressure to be lively and clever and witty. He didn’t feel pressure to be anything.

“What about a pizza?” Paul asked. “That’s a New York sort of thing, right?”

“You'd best put on a false beard or something,” John said comfortably. “Though I don’t know that a beard would do it anymore, you’re too famous. You had better go for the full balaclava.”

“Balaclava? Should it be comforting to me that I remind you of a Crimean War veteran? I’m only twenty-six.”

“Well it isn’t comforting to _me_ , son.”

Paul laughed. He picked up the phone, realized he hadn’t got a clue who to call, and dropped it back into the cradle. He thought he could easily ring up Neil and Mal at the hotel down the street and have a pizza delivered in five minutes - delivered by naked women if he wanted it - but he wasn’t in the mood. He went into the kitchen and cast about vaguely for a telephone book, but was saved by a pizzeria menu Sellotaped to Nat’s fridge.

When the delivery boy rang the buzzer, John picked up in a high-pitched falsetto, deliberately clowning around to make Paul laugh for the first time in how long? Months? Everybody was so bloody serious all the time, lately.

In fact they  hadn’t been abroad together like this, just the two of them, since Paris. Paris in 1961, that was. There was always someone else around. And since they had stopped touring there weren’t any more hotel rooms in strange places with only each other.

They obtained the pizza without fanfare or disguises, in the end, and sat round eating it in a companionable fashion. It _was_ like Paris, this. Sitting in somebody else’s flat eating takeaway and being with each other, even though the flat was nicer and they were older and traveling on their own earnings now, not John’s birthday money.

“Remember Paris?” Paul said to John, though he already knew John did.

John quirked an eyebrow curiously. “‘Course.”

They didn’t bring up Paris often, not with so much water under the bridge between now and then. Still, there was never a question that Paul was referring to some other Paris, Paris in 1964 or 1965 or 1966, because Paris was always 1961. Paris was when they’d dropped everything and taken off together, no responsibilities, not even any guitars, just the whole of the grand city before them and the two of them at its heart. The plan had been that in France John would be responsible for the French and that in Spain Paul would be responsible for the Spanish, but they’d never made it to Spain and John didn’t know much French to start with, so they had mostly just talked to each other.

It was hard to even grasp all of the water that had gone under the bridge since then, actually, but Paul would remember it always. That little fleabag hotel was drawn richly in his memory even compared to the George V.

 _That was only seven years ago_ \- _Christ_ , _not even seven years ago,_ he thought, amazed, and he did feel like a war veteran, not twenty-six but a hundred and twenty-six.

The corner of his mouth turned up involuntarily and he laughed a little,  just an outward snort of breath. “That was a hell of a time, wasn’t it?”

“What made you think of that? Two lads alone in the big city, eh? In fancy dress?”

“Hair’s a bit longer,” Paul said.

“Ah, just as long as it’s not your face,” John said.

“That too,” Paul said ruefully, and snorted again. “Remember when Jürgen took us to the opera house? And you, you kept singing Dizzy Miss Lizzy, except all … operatic.”

“It worked on those ballerinas outside in the little … bustle things.”

“I don’t recall you pulling any of them though.”

“Well,” John waggled his eyebrow as though confiding a secret.  “I couldn’t let you be a third wheel, you see. It would have been downright sad.”

“Ah, get off. How much’ve you had?”

“Not enough,” John said. He rose and turned toward the kitchen, then paused and raised a lanky, graceful arm above his head. His hips and legs sketched out a ballet pose, just a suggestion of one.

Paul eyed him expectantly.

“Sorry, I was taken a Frenchman there for a moment. Come ‘ead, let’s see if old Nat has any Château Lafite or whatever the fuck it’s called.”

Paul stood and followed him, laughing.

Nat had a whole cupboard filled with a very nice selection of wine, as it turned out, and Paul pulled out the first one he saw that had French on the label. He’d reimburse Nat later. It had been a long time since he’d had to deny himself anything simply because of the cost.

He set the wine on the butcher block while he and John hunted for a corkscrew, but they couldn’t turn one up despite checking every drawer in the place.

“Foiled!” John said. “Not meant to be, then.”

“Fuck that, did you forget how to make do? Soft lad. Where there’s a will there’s a way.” Paul seized a wooden spoon, braced a hand on the bottle's neck to keep it stable and started tapping away on the cork with the handle of the spoon. He gradually exerted more pressure, slowly, holding his breath a bit. It wasn’t like opening champagne but it was almost as knuckle-biting because when the cork finally popped down it often splashed and -

It gave with a soft _pop_ and it did splash, spraying a fan of purple droplets all over the front of his shirt and vest. He yelped and jumped backward.

“Oh, bloody - christ!” He turned to grab a dish towel off the sink.

“Leave it,” John said in a strange voice. “It’s festive."

“What?” Paul said blankly.

“Leave it,” John repeated.

His hand moved convulsively, covered a distance of about six inches and closed on Paul’s wrist.

Paul looked down at it in amazement and then back up at John’s face. His mouth was a round O as John closed the remaining space between them and before he had time to realize what John was on about _John was kissing him,_ John was kissing him, John was kissing him. Paul didn’t make a conscious decision to return the kiss but simply did so, sighing into John’s mouth in a hot rush, his head tilting bonelessly to the side like he’d been waiting for it all evening.

John wasn’t kissing him softly, he had kissed Paul with decisive, messy force like he’d thought he had better make the most of this opportunity in case it never came again, but once he realized Paul was kissing him back he went at it with a building intensity that made the blood rush to Paul’s head. John’s tongue parted Paul’s lips, bold and sure, and Paul dropped the dish towel he’d been pointlessly holding and plunged his hand into the long hair at the nape of John’s neck.

He had never been kissed like this before, never, never, never, not just because John was a man but because John was John. Paul had been kissed by men before a couple of times and it had been all right, the light rasp of stubble was no shock to him but John was John. Paul instantly measured every other kiss to this, the kisses of every groupie, of every girlfriend and every single one was found wanting. John was kissing him like he wanted to bruise him, like he wanted to be inside him, like every touch of Paul’s lips was lighting him up. For his part, Paul too was alight - instantly erect and blushing so hard that he was giving off British Thermal Units like a furnace.

“Paul,” John breathed against his mouth when they were able to draw breath and Paul had never heard his own name sound so much like an endearment or possibly an incantation.

In response, Paul wrapped an arm around John’s waist. He pulled their long lengths flush and there was a frisson when he realized that John’s cock was hard too, hard and pressing against the front of his trousers. He licked along John’s lower lip. His body was responding automatically to John’s the way it always had - well, a slightly different way perhaps, but hadn’t this always been a part of it? It was nothing that disturbed him. Everything felt perfectly natural, okay, kissing John in the lawyer’s kitchen. Okay. Everything was going to be okay, especially if they just kept kissing and never had to talk about it.

John’s mouth even tasted familiar, probably all those years on the same microphone, all those times John’s face had been close enough to kiss.

Not that Paul had _thought_ about it.

He backed John against the counter and pressed his hips into him, fitting the two of them neatly together from the collarbones on down. John fisted a handful of Paul’s vest and slid his hand around to Paul’s waist, letting it rest there almost chastely as though they were dancing.

“Yeah?” Paul asked dazedly, not knowing whether _yeah_ meant _Do you want this_ or _Is this real_ or _Oh my God, John, this is mad, do it again._

John laughed against his mouth. “Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.”

“Kitchens?” Paul asked. “Kitchens drive you buck wild, then?”

“Just this one,” John said. He slid his hand lower, hooking a finger into the waistband of Paul’s trousers.

The feeling of John’s knuckle against the bare skin of Paul’s stomach was so sudden and so real that it caused Paul’s heart to leap into his throat. He was dizzy, lightheaded, weak-kneed with want, his pulse rapid and so strong it was almost audible, a bass rhythm he’d never heard before. He wondered if John could hear it, hear his heart, or feel that rhythm thrumming through his fingertips. He canted a hip harder into John, pressing their erections together, and John groaned low in his throat and hooked a second finger under Paul’s waistband as though testing the waters.

Paul kissed him again and they clung to each other, the ginger-brown and black strands of their fringe mixing together, the long flat planes of their thighs pressed together, their breaths coming together, perfectly in harmony. There were no other sounds in the kitchen besides the sounds of their mouths on one another and for Paul there might as well have not been any other sounds on the whole island of Manhattan. There were no sounds, there was no music, but for Paul the music had always been John, anyway.

John got a hand between them with difficulty and undid the top buttons of Paul’s trousers. His long clever fingers paused at the exposed triangle of skin. Paul could feel him hovering there and he wanted to scream. His heart hammered and it was off-rhythm now, psychedelic, aimless yearning abstract heartbeats, the bassist was out of control. He wanted John to touch him, he wanted to make John beg, he wanted to make John come, he wanted to make up for lost time. _Oh, my God_ , he wanted it all.

“Like Paris?” John asked silkily. “Do you know what I wanted to do with you in Paris?”

“No, but I’d be very interested to find out,” Paul said.

“Inquisitive lad.”  John stretched his fingers down the front of Paul’s trousers.

Paul was transfixed by the focus and intensity on his face. It was an expression he knew from writing with John, it was the expression John wore when he was working on committing every second to memory. _Every second of reaching for my prick_ , he thought, and nearly came on the spot when he felt John’s fingers wrapping around him. He shuddered. John's voice was the most erotic part of this. He'd had sex thousands of times with hundreds of birds and getting your cock touched by one was much the same as getting your cock touched by another, but John's voice washed over him and turned the whole thing up, like turning an amplifier knob all the way to the right.

“This?” he managed.

“This,” John agreed, “to start with.” As they kissed again he used his other hand to push Paul’s trousers off his hips a little and got a better grip on Paul’s cock without the mohair in the way. John stroked him a couple of times, gently, experimentally, and Paul thought _oh, fuck, oh, fuck, this is happening, this is real, this is happening NOW_. On the one hand, it was a leap into a terrifying unknown, and on the other hand he was having to think of maths and lists of Apple figures to keep himself from coming in his pants immediately.

He splayed his own hand against the front of John’s trousers, pressing the flat of his palm over John’s erection, getting a little competitive thrill from the sharp intake of breath John gave him against his mouth as a reward.

“And that little madam who owned that hotel,” John said when they broke apart to breathe, and because John’s hand was fondling his cock it took Paul a second to register that he was still reminiscing about Paris.

“What about her?” Paul asked, handily getting John’s trouser buttons undone. “ _You_ wanted to fuck her, if I recall.”

“She asked me if she should send us girls. Whores.”

“Oh?”

“And I said no.”

“Did you.”

“So she said, what are you, a couple of queers? _Êtes-_ _vous folles_ , that’s what she said.” He ground his hips into Paul’s hand and leaned into Paul, predatory, his breath warm on Paul’s ear. “I said, _oui_.”

Paul didn’t respond. His breath hitched unevenly with John’s strokes, John’s voice.

“Wanted you all to myself. No whores, no ballerinas, just you. But I cocked it up. Didn’t have the nerve.”

His hand moved faster, firmer, surer and Paul tilted his head back, exposing his throat to John’s mouth. His vision blurred.

 _Oui...Oui… a couple of queers._ That was what it had been like in Paris, yes, with the smoky little cafes and the bell bottoms like the sailors wore and all those mornings of laying together in that narrow, squeaky little bed, smoking and talking, only inches apart. But nothing had happened. Neither of them had reached for the other. Why?

 _Because of the band_ ,  Paul’s brain supplied coldly. _Oh, don’t you remember? You wanted to kiss him but if you started kissing him that was all you’d ever do again. Remember the band?_

“Fuck,” he said, in a desperate, frustrated voice that was lust and regret and something else, too.

He kissed John again, hard, as though the feeling of John’s tongue in his mouth could drive the thoughts away, the thoughts of the band, of the world beyond this room, the world beyond John, the past and the future, all of the things that could tear them apart, all of the things that had already torn them apart. John’s mouth was hot and familiar, it _tasted_ familiar, it tasted familiar from all those times on the same microphone, all those years, all those times John had been close enough to kiss.

Had it been this tension that had kept them together? Had it always?

_And you thought that if it went pear-shaped that’d be all, remember? No John, no Paul and John, no Lennon-McCartney, no band. No Beatles. Move that hand a few inches over on the bed and not just writing partners anymore, eh? And you’ve seen, you’ve seen, you’ve seen what he does to people once he doesn’t want them anymore._

Suddenly he saw it all in flames and ashes, all they had worked for, all they had given their nervous systems for. The foundation of the Beatles was John and Paul,  Paul and John, and on that shaky foundation of two lads from Merseyside they had built their empire. The tenuous, loving, row-filled jealous brotherhood between them was everything. How easily, how cruelly it seemed it could all come crashing down with the wave that was encompassing Paul now. John was telling him he’d wanted him for years. It was suddenly more horrifying than it was arousing.

He jerked his mouth away from John’s almost involuntarily and backed away, pressing the back of his hand to his lips.

“Hey?” John asked.

“Hey,” Paul said. “It’s, uh, I … I…” He fumbled to do up his trouser buttons, self-consciously aware that he didn’t want to have this conversation with his cock out. “I don’t think we - I don’t think we ought to -” He stumbled getting the words out, but the words themselves sounded stupid and clumsy and hypocritical as hell, frankly, coming as they were from lips still bee-stung with John Lennon’s kisses.

“I just don’t think we ought to,” he finished lamely.

John stared at him in bafflement. “For Christ’s sake, why not?”

Paul suddenly felt like he couldn’t bear the wine-scented kitchen another moment. He spun and strode back into the living room where everything might still be sane and wasn’t.

John followed close on his heels, his own trouser buttons still undone. “Paul. Paul. Paul, what in fucking hell? Are you ill? Paul.”

“I’m not ill.”

“Then what?”

Paul tried out a couple of responses, mentally, to include _I was overwhelmed by whatever just happened in there_ and _This is neither the time nor the place_ and _I used to think I might be in love with you so I don’t know how good an idea it is to fuck around like this now_. All of them seemed entirely insufficient as well as naff beyond belief.

“I don’t know, John, I don’t know,” he said shortly. He sank down on one end of the couch, feeling like it might defuse the situation a little, and John sat down on the opposite end, but sitting didn’t alter the brittle energy that crackled between them.

“Is it me?” John said, after a painful silence that couldn’t have been more than five seconds long but felt much, much longer. “It’s because it’s me, isn’t it?”

Paul shook his head, _no_ , but aloud he said, “Of course it’s because it’s you. Not -  not that way. There’s nothing wrong with you. I just - I haven’t -”

"I thought you … might have thought about it."

"I haven't," Paul said automatically, and oh that was a _lie_.

There was another loaded silence. A muscle in John's cheek jumped a little. Paul stared at it; it seemed safer than looking John in the eyes.

"Well I wasn't asking you to marry me," John said.

"John - "

“It’s not all on me. I wasn’t holding you down in there.” A defensive acidic tone had crept into his voice now, a tone Paul recognized immediately and hated instinctively,  a tone that was usually reserved for other people and _never_ used on him. “Your fuckin’ prick did the talking.”

“You’re not bloody – _listening_.”

"Well, you haven’t bloody said anything. But forget it. You ought to go and ring up that girl from today. No need for Paul McCartney to be lonely."

"John, _stop_ ," Paul said. His head felt like it was reeling, he felt like he was proper drunk, his responses sluggish and stupid. "Stop a moment - this is just a lot - "

"It's not. It's easy. Love is all you need, right? How hard is it, Paul?"

Paul exhaled through his nose, a long thin breath, wishing he could go back in time five or ten minutes, wishing he could go back in time five years. The breath bought him a few seconds but little clarity.

"What about the Beatles?" he said slowly, referring to the band as they seemed always to do now - as though it was some monstrous, unknowable entity that dwarfed them all instead of something of which they were an intrinsic part. "If you and I … What would happen to the band?"

"People wouldn't care," John said, "and if they did they'd get over it and if they didn't, _I_ don't care." His lip curled contemptuously. "We wore our hair long and it was bloody alright eventually, we told the world about the grass and the acid and it was alright eventually. People _will_ get over anything. And," he added with a different slight edge in his tone now, a warning edge, "do not tell me that you have not fucking thought about it because I know you, Paul."  

Paul was silent. Of course he had thought about it, but not seriously, not in years. Years.

Not for years after it had become apparent to him that they were past any possibility of a return, past any point of a different future, past the point of winding up in an artist's garret in Paris, past the point of busking for money on the docks, living in some squalid bedsit with each other, past the point where they were some nameless Paul and John, Paul teaching music somewhere, John drawing on the Left Bank, past the point where they were together and free. Past the point where they might have gotten away with it.

But they had gone past all that now, long past, and he had long since resigned himself to the way things were. The aperture had closed and the limitlessness of those possible futures had gradually narrowed to the one that they were living in, the one where they were Beatles, the most unlikely one of all. Not nameless Paul and John now but Lennon-McCartney. And even though they were under a microscope still he and John had each other in nearly every way, and Paul had been content, his name linked with John’s, his mind linked with John’s, his art linked with John’s, Lennon-McCartney forever.

Mostly content.

Paul’s mouth was as dry as ashes. He opened it and tried not to put his foot in.

“I - I … I have,” he said with an intense effort. They had never spoken of this before, never come _near_ speaking of this before, and the words came forth as though dragged from him. “I thought - I wanted - but you - we had the band.” 

 _I thought I wanted, but then we had the band._ Well, that was as good of an epitaph for their relationship as they’d ever get, probably.

John stared at him. John had those deep old sailor’s eyes that could look right into Paul, and they looked into him now. He didn’t say anything aloud but there was a lot in that stare and Paul felt the weight of it.

“If you knew, then why didn’t you say anything before?” Paul said defensively. “Before - before - just, before.”

“Wasn’t sure, was I?” John said. He had torn his eyes away from Paul’s face at Paul’s admission, he was now looking hard at a spot somewhere above Paul’s left ear. “Couldn’t ever be sure. Why didn’t _you_ say anything?”

It was Paul’s turn to be silent.

Because he had known too, hadn’t he? Had known for years. He had known when they had been impossibly young and jerking off together and he had opened his eyes to see John watching his face, his eyes dark with want. He had known when he and John had slept in the same bed night after night and he’d wake with John’s face pressed into his shoulder and John’s erection pressed into his hip. He had known when John tickled him and poked him and hugged him and touched his hands and his face and his hair, touched him like he was _willed_ , like he was _compelled_ , hundreds of times over the years and years and years he had known.

Best, worst, he had known from the songs.   _(There is no one compares with you.)_

But like John, he hadn’t ever been _sure_. Hadn’t ever been sure and had been quietly terrified that to acknowledge the thing might break it, so really John had been wrong in a way - Paul had never actually, explicitly let himself think about it. He had always had a dim sense that what was between him and John could too easily get out of control and pitch over a cliff. Not thinking about it was safer. What if the indefinable something between them was what made them good? Defining it might crack it apart, like trying to remember a dream.

Then, too, there was no reason really to think about it. Paul hadn’t ever known what he wanted from John, he had only known that he wanted John, and he had him.

More or less, that was. 

Paul closed his eyes. “I didn’t think there was anything to talk about.”

John didn’t respond.

“We haven’t… talked,” Paul said, opening his eyes, “much lately, have we? We haven’t written.”

“No,” John said warily.

“Well,” Paul said, “it is fucking hard to talk to you right now, I’ll tell you that. ‘Course, we’ve never… y’know.”

“Talked about it.”

 “Yes. No.”  

“But we had -”

“- thought about it. Yes.”

Paul felt like there were two conversations happening, the one he could hear and the one he couldn’t. They were speaking with a remarkable economy of words but through the connection between them a shadow conversation was taking place too, clothing the bare bones of the sparse words with flesh of weight and meaning. He watched John’s eyes. Blood pulsed in his temples, his fingers, his chest, his prick, every heartbeat loud in the silence between them where the other conversation was taking place. 

He thought he wanted John to kiss him again.

He was horrified that John might kiss him again.

He was horrified that he was aroused.

 “I’m going to marry Jane,” he said, as though to squelch everything that was happening inside him.

“And just what the hell does that have to do with the price of biscuits in Tibet?”

“It has to do with - with - _marriage_.”

“Paul,” John said as though explaining something to a very elderly or mad person, “you’ve made it with a thousand girls. Jane didn’t seem to mind. _You_ didn’t seem to mind.”

“It isn’t that,” Paul said, and then, distractedly, “and there probably weren’t a thousand.”

“Well then, what?” John said in exasperated tones. “You want to talk, then have at it.”

“They weren’t you,” Paul snapped. “Those girls weren’t you.”

There was another loaded silence, full to bursting like the air before a thunderstorm. They looked at each other, in the eyes now.

_I know you. You decide you want something, it’s like there are no consequences at all._

_What consequences are these?_

_You’re not a nameless groupie in a nameless city, you’re you. I need you._

  _It’s not that big a fucking thing, Paul. It’s us._

 

_It’s always a big fucking thing with you. It’s always going to be a big fucking thing with you._

Aloud John said, “This is fucking ridiculous. We said that we - that we both - well, there’s just no reason we shouldn’t, if we both want to.”

“I don’t know what I want,” said Paul. Now he was the one staring at a spot somewhere over John’s left ear. “There’s a lot riding on… everything. I need time.”

“It’s been a long time, Paul. How much longer do you want?”

“It’s been about thirty minutes,” Paul said tiredly, but he knew – and he knew John knew – that it had been a hell of a lot longer than thirty minutes.

 

*

 

 **June 1968  
** **Number 7, Cavendish**

 

It was too late.

When had it become too late 

Had it always been too late for them? It had, hadn’t it, since … since…

Paul hadn’t specified to John how long he was going to want to think it over, as a consequence, John had elected not to give him any time at all. The rest of their trip to New York had been suffused with a fragile truce, an airless tight entente in which they didn’t sit too close to one another, deliberately avoided touching hands, and put on a show for the remainder of the press junket only to lapse into long and dreadful silences when alone, but Paul still hadn’t expected _this_.

This, the sudden dissolution of what he was now horribly, belatedly aware was the most important thing in his entire fucking life. The recognition of what Paul’s moment of hesitation, of _cowardice_ , had cost.

His fingers curled aimlessly against the comfortably worn green velvet that covered his favorite armchair and which was no comfort now. In his heart he had thought that once back on English soil the two of them might somehow return to normalcy, as though the trip to New York was an bizarre opium dream, but weeks later it had become more than clear that that wasn’t going to be the case. When John broke from someone he broke from them completely, broke from them and cleaved to someone else. Shouldn’t he, Paul, have known that better than anyone?

And now he had to watch John with That Woman, the woman who had been just another peripheral woman before New York but who now sat constantly at John’s elbow like a fetch from some old fairy tale.

There was a small, cold hole in his abdomen, somewhere right behind his sternum, the place where their intimacy had lived, the place where the _certainty_ of John’s devotion had lived and it couldn’t be filled, couldn’t be filled even though Paul had been pouring Scotch into it with a worrying regularity. The Scotch couldn’t dull that cold and it couldn’t dull Paul’s sudden stark recognition of his own arrogance, the God-damned bloody _conceit_ that he’d been filled with to think that John would wait around as long as Paul wanted him to.

Going to the studio every day was becoming a dreadful Sisyphean effort and under the music the brittle truce endured. 

It was pushing the boulder up the hill again and again, every day, working out the songs, seeming like a nightmarish parody of Lennon/McCartney. It _was_ nightmarish in its way to observe what was happening to them and Paul felt as though he was observing it from somewhere outside, an academic observer, an anthropologist watching the breakdown in a long-established culture, observing every minute dissolution, the absence of each long-held ritual.

George and Ringo knew. They had to, how couldn’t they know? Paul felt exposed, like his heart was open in his chest, his beating bitter heart, right there in his ribcage for anyone to see, right above the cold little hole that Scotch couldn’t fill.

“Francie!” he shouted, his voice sudden and loud in the empty sitting room. His dad had always been stern about shouting in the house but what the fuck, it was his house. “Francie!”

After a moment her face poked around the corner, then she entered the room and sashayed prettily toward him. She was so easy to get along with, brassy and funny, not like Jane. It was good not to be reminded too strongly of Jane, although he was beginning to suspect that he hadn't ever loved Jane anyway, or else it was that the loss of his engagement simply hadn't been able to hit squarely home in the hole where his heart used to be.  

“What is it, handsome?”

He pulled her down into his lap and his arms went around her. Dark strands of her hair tickled his face.

“Where were you?”

“Just getting some dinner together. I was told,” she said a little pointedly, “that you wanted a bit of time to yourself.”

“Ah. Yes, that.”

“Yes. That.”

His hand cupped her breast and he opened his mouth intending to be apologetically flirty, but an unromantic question slipped out instead.

“How was it? At the studio today?”

“How was –”

"I dunno, just, everything.” Paul twirled a hand in the air, faux-casually. 

 “It was great, hon. You were great. You know I love Blackbird.”

 "Ah. Thanks.”

 “And that thing John and Yoko are working on is interesting, isn’t it? It’s so weird!”

 “It is that,” Paul agreed. His hand moved restlessly on her breast, his thumb circling her nipple through her shirt.

“He’s _really_ wrapped up in her, isn’t he?” Francie said with a touch of envy, as though she wished her own rockstar displayed such naked devotion. “It's wild, he can’t stop looking at her.”

 Paul wanted to say from the depths of his frozen insides that he’d never seen John like that before, but Francie was a nice girl and he had always hated to lie.

 

*

 

 **July 1968  
** **EMI Studios**

 

“Do you, don’t you want me to love you,” Paul sang to himself under his breath. He paused to adjust a string, then launched back in. The song was in the early stages but he was envisioning it as a huge rave-up eventually.

He was playing quietly, almost as though to himself, trying not to look at John working at the mixing board on the other side of the studio. He hadn’t been alone with John for … actually months it was now, just turned two months but at least he’d gotten to a point where the back of his neck didn’t prickle when they were in a room together. Still, even though he was concentrating hard on the tune his head snapped up when he heard John’s voice.

"For Christ’s sake, Paul, stop it."

 "Stop ...what?" His fingers paused above the strings, waiting.

 John took the cans off his head and set them down with more force than was strictly necessary. He leapt to his feet, John had always hated to argue while sitting, even years after he’d stopped punching people to win arguments. He fixed Paul with an icy stare.

 "Don't you want me, can you take me back – all that rubbish." Paul must have looked stricken because even in John's fury he amended his words. "Not the _songs_ , Paul, the songs aren’t rubbish, but … I don't want to listen to it anymore."

 "To -"

 John made abstract gestures with his long hands. "Listen to you. Listen to you do — this."

There was a horrible silence during which Paul understood _this_ to mean _abase himself in front of John through song._ He flushed, embarrassed that John had recognized to whom and about what he had been singing so often lately but that had been the point, wasn't it?

Hadn't that always been the point?

He felt prickle of blood rise in his cheeks. So they were going to talk about it, were they? After the last two months of agony, _now_ they were going to have it out? And everything he had thought to say, late at night through all eight of the previous increasingly friable weeks, every word went out the window and he said the only thing he could think of.

 "I made a mistake," Paul said, trying to keep his voice from shaking. Dimly he thought that if John still knew him well, John would know what it cost for Paul McCartney to cop to making a mistake. Mistake, fuck-up, colossal bloody balls-up, arrogant bastard Paul McCartney.

John barked a laugh. "You made a mistake? You?"

 _I didn't realize everything was going to change,_ Paul wanted to say, but that sounded so lost and pathetic that he couldn't bring himself to say it aloud. He revised it to "I thought if we - if we - could just go on, you know, the way it always was –”

"Well it bloody can't, Paul. Here I was waiting around for you. I should have known that you were just pulling me around by me prick all these years. But that was the last of it, that was the last."  

 "Now hang on a minute, John," Paul said, momentary contriteness gone and temper firing like a solar flare, pouring out hot and thick and blinding bright. "I was going to say I was wrong for – not – I was going to come around but it took me some bloody time.”  He drew a deep breath. “This is you, y'know? You think just because someone can't give you everything at once that they don't need you, that that they don't love you. That's not how it is, it's not all or nothing, I don’t – people don’t bloody _work_ that way, you know?"

John bared his teeth. In a different conversation it could have been a smile, but in this one it definitely wasn’t. "It's all or fucking nothing to me."

"Yes, I see that," Paul said, dripping with scorn. "I see that. I tell you I need some time to screw me head on straight and you start doing dope and release an album with your prick hanging out.”

John shook his head. "The way it always was, Paul? You want to go back to the way it always was?" he mocked nastily. "You were happy with the way it always was, were you?" 

"I was happy," Paul said in a dull voice. “I didn’t think that you weren’t, but what the hell do I know?”

 John moved with a frightening, wiry speed until his face was only centimeters away from Paul's own. "Happy, were you? You were happy? Happy to be – to be loved and loved and fucking loved without giving anything back? Yes, I can see how that would make you happy.”

They had now said the word "love" four times.

Well, really, the two of them had said and sung the word "love" thousands upon thousands of times, but almost never in the context that mattered.

Paul felt again the weight of eleven years' perpetual adoration which he had thrown away out of fear, out of something, something he couldn't remember. It caused him a nearly-physical pain, that weight, as though the cold that had settled inside his chest was making itself at home. 

"I _was_ happy. With you. I was happy the way things were. I didn’t _know_ that you... You and I have - we’ve -  I thought you hated the way the press was treating you and that woman, you think they'd be kinder to us? D'you think we'd still have a bloody band if we were - " 

"Sod the band." John said, his voice a fathomless frozen lake. "Sod the Beatles. I would have done it. Whatever it took, whatever it cost I would have given it."

Paul's heart cracked at the past tense, the ugly _would have._

"But you chose the band, Paul. You chose the Beatles. So we're here, now, Beatles. And I wish you fuckin' joy of it."

John spun on his heel. He had nearly reached the door when Paul made a snap decision, took a few quick jerky strides and lay a hand on his shoulder.

John stilled. They hadn't touched each other, accidentally or on purpose, for weeks.

"I love you," Paul said. 

He said it quietly, and to the back of John's head, thus couldn't see what expression if any might have crossed John's face.

John didn't move.

There didn't seem to be much else to say, so Paul left it there. Later he would think about what he could have added, what magic words he might have added, that would have stopped John leaving. In fact he wouldn't be able to stop thinking of it, like a tooth that kept aching, like a sore tooth that you kept running your tongue over, and like a sore tooth he'd resort to whiskey to dull the jabs.

John shrugged Paul's hand off his shoulder almost carelessly, pushed the door open and left.

 

*

 

**Author's Note:**

> N. named it with matchless intuition after I had failed with about seventeen crap titles, and it wouldn't have been written without her, so of course it's for her. Also thank you, SC for picking out my typos and urging me to get the fuck on with it, and homeskillets on tumblr who kept telling me they liked sad sack stories. And I said hey, I like sad sack stories too, so there's literally dozens of us, dozens!
> 
> And I got the idea for the piece while reading Paterson, so this is also for Dr. William Carlos Williams, who – father of Beats – I hope would not be appalled. May we all be able to string words together with a fraction of the beauty you did, even about New Jersey.


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